It's the first day of the month, and that makes it Hive Power Up Day !
Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio
I've done my bit this month, powering up 1000 of my liquid HIVE;
How Are Things Looking ?
It looks like the price of HIVE has basically stabilised for now, with a slight downward trend. Of course, with World War 3 starting to get seriously underway, the markets can expect some turmoil over the next month or two.
If an oil tanker or aircraft carrier goes down somewhere near the Straights of Hormuz, I expect to see some noticeable wobbles in all markets ! My suspicion is that all sides in the war are telling porkies, making propaganda and under-reporting their own losses (all those hits on US bases and NO casualties - seriously ?) The approach I'm taking is to watch the price of gold, because the people making serious moves (and possible manipulations) in that space are likely to be the ones who really know what's actually happening. Although I wish I'd bet on some oil futures 😉
My take on Hive right now is that it continues to be a great ecosystem and social platform. It might be a bit niche (we need to get the word out !), but it's not full of the advertising, newsfeed manipulation and toxic rubbish of the legacy social media.
It's also too niche to be on governments' radars when it comes to their censorship and control obsessions, so although I rarely post anything controversial it's nice to be somewhere that I don't have the constant feeling of Big Brother leaning over my shoulder and watching everything I do. While I appreciate that it's an open blockchain so could theoretically be read by government agencies looking for signs of dissent, for now I think they're pretty much occupied picking people up for posting on mainstream platforms.
An Appeal
There are a number of people who I think make a huge positive difference in Hive, for all kinds of reasons. Some are technicians keeping the underlying code functional, some are vocal and active engagers who encourage fellow Hivers. And some are a bit of both.
Top of the tree on that front is 
Quite a chunk of the funding that makes all this work comes from the witness node he runs, #thebbhproject. The higher the node gets up the rankings the more it'll earn, and most of those earnings are being returned to Hivers in the form of rewards for the various projects he runs.
I suspect quite a few of my readers have voted for it already, but if you haven't, I really encourage you to do so ! But my real thought is that with HIVE being so cheap now, if you've voted for his node already, then the more HIVE you power up into HP, the more you'll be doing to support the node as well as increasing your own curation earnings.